For one born today –
yearly a time of endings –
you're most generous
of all the people I know
with aiding new beginnings.


Happy birthday, oaken_glen!

Thanks to everyone who played along with this year's tanka challenge. I've enjoyed the reading this month.

It is the same bed
where these flowers are planted
and same balanced soil,
but one flower opens wide
and one decays at the roots.

I want to sleep here,
next to you on the white sheets
and reach to your skin
with nothing left in between
you and I and purity.

By day I’m raising
sand castles along the shore.
Occupied with walls
I find that evening comes fast -
then waves crash through all the same.

Tanka from reading a random page in an I Ching book:

The sun climbs the curve
of the earth, in the I Ching
a sign of progress:
"progress signifies the day,"
"clarity rises on earth."

But that hot gas ball
just lights up what is settled
and what may still grow,
and by the latter green path
I must go, for it is life.

Winter’s bright fireflies
hover over the green boughs,
motionless today –
not at all the lively things
that seek love in the June warmth.

Today I relaxed
in the heart of a family
with aunts and cousins
who are not my relations
but share themselves nonetheless.

Now it seems to me
that I may wander the year
and always return
to this one hearth, ever lit
and crowded with random joys.

A one-inch white nose
in a little feline face
can make as much noise
snoring while asleep at dawn
as any human I’ve heard.

So much of what’s here
beneath the high vault of stars
means more than the rain
that taps the skin of my face
and falls in streaks past a smile.

How long, I wonder,
before this warmth melts away
the wooden resolve
of the trees to keep their leaves
stowed and hidden from the world?